I see. I kind of figured if you had production parrot it would imply production rakudo. I guess I was wrong. I do see your point on why that needs clarified.

But I don't see your point on why it is good to call the different parts completely different names. I'm fine with calling things the "Perl compiler", "Perl interpreter" or "Perl VM". It's the same naming method as every other language I know. When you run it with just one command it really doesn't make sense. Right now, I type perl somescript.pl and I only deal with one program.

I'll admit that I haven't kept up well with Perl 6, but I'd be surprised, and somewhat disappointed, if it's any harder to use than rakudo somescript.pl or whatever the program I see eventually winds up being called. I didn't think we would have to do something like perlc stuff.pl; perl stuff

So yes, they are different pieces and can't be talked about the same, and that makes sense. But in the end it'll all be Perl6.

But I don't see your point on why it is good to call the different parts completely different names. I'm fine with calling things the "Perl compiler", "Perl interpreter" or "Perl VM".

That was fine for Perl 5, where the language was defined by the compiler/interpreter, and there wasn't any chance to ever have a competing compiler/interpreter.

For Perl 6 that's different. The language is defined by a bunch of text documents describing the language, and a test suite that is becoming the code representation of that specification.

There are multiple Perl 6 compilers in the works (namely pugs, Rakudo, Elf, mildew + smop), and calling them all just "Perl 6 compiler" would be very confusing.

If you like the analogy, there's also not "the C compiler", but various of those (GCC, MSVC, Borland, Intel's s C compiler, Sun's C compiler, TCC, ...)

For parrot it's a bit different: its purpose is to serve as a virtual machine for multiple languages (Perl 6, Lua, TCL and Ruby, to name just the most active or advanced compilers targeting parrot), so it wouldn't do the project justices to call it "the Perl VM".